Hope

Tonight I gave a short presentation on hope for the start of Advent.  Not much of a religious man I know (well maybe you don't actually know this old Presbyterian that well) but I was invited.  I spoke about how hope can be a prison.  How action is much better.  How we all have power if we only knew it.  I still don't know it I think.  

And then I read this.  I know a thing or two about fracking and you might want to know something about it too.  Particularly if you live in a rural area.  I guess the hope is almost all squeezed out of me.  

I see where we are going thanks to fracking.  People are poisoned, slowly but surely, wherever it spreads.  And shale (and therefore gas and oil) is everywhere.  Maybe there are some places with tiny shale reserves under the ground, inefficient to extract.  For now.  But to keep the party going we are going to frack everywhere.  Force out every last cubic metre of gas, every last barrel of oil.  And we're going to burn them and party until we can't.  I expect that this will mean that all the humans will leave the countryside for cities and towns.  Easier to police of course.  And then there will be no one to require public meetings and public information sessions.  Lakes will be drained and turned into frack fluid.  The air will be thick with chemicals.  Many animals will die.  But the city lights will stay on.  This is where we are choosing to go. 

Makes hope an attractive thing.  But I'm not going anywhere. 

Bison?

I took my sister to the dentist the other day with my mum.  On the way out, my mum bumped into someone she had worked with at the local nursing home.  The lady's husband it turns out is the fellow I'd hear about who raises bison.  I had heard that he has a loyal clientele and was unlikely to have any to sell but I thought (as mum would say) 'what the heck' and told his wife that I'd be interested in ordering some.  

He called the other day.  So it looks like we are getting the front quarter of a bison sometime this week.  Should cost around $270 he said.  I don't buy meat from the grocery store and those killers at XL Foods but I think it'll work out to be equal or somewhat cheaper.  And the bison doesn't get fed GMO corn until it's almost dead like conventional beef cattle.  It's all grass and apples. So organic effectively and local.  Can't beat it.  

I guess perhaps that the reason people go to the grocery store for meat is because it's easy.  And maybe they don't have the money to put up for a big order.  Maybe we're just disorganized.  But think how much we could be supporting local beef (and bison) farmers instead of big feedlot companies?  Wouldn't that be better?

It's going to be a lot of meat.  We'll find room for it I'm sure.  And we can share it with friends and family too if there's too much.  I've never done this kind of big order before but there's always a first. 

I heard a doctor of Chinese medicine recently who said that a Chinese friend was shocked that in North America, summer is barbeque season.  He said that meat (especially red meat) is a hot food and is meant to be eaten during the winter.  It's not healthy to eat hot food in a hot season.  This makes sense to me.  Also it's a time of no fresh veg (unless you go to the grocery store and I resist).  So maybe it's a time for meat and potatoes.  

Brutal

Another important, yet always hidden and justified, real story of real people.

Apologies

I have not been keeping up with writing. Sorry.  Not that I think many people are reading.  But still it's good to have a journal.  

So what's new?  What's worth talking about?  Fiscal cliff: boring.  Palestine: same old story.  US election: get ready for the one party system.  Omnibus: you expected something different?

So we'll get back to real things.  The garden is almost finished for the year.  We still have jerusalem artichokes and parsnips in the ground and provided it doesn't freeze completely we'll still have time to dig them up and store for winter.  Our basement is full of potatoes and carrots and beets.  Feels like the hot, dry summer made for less of a potato harvest but I'm not sure.  I think it's more or less the same.  

The first year with a greenhouse was a great success.  Lots of jars of really sweet and bright red tomatoes in the basement.  We made some eggplant pickle and our very own hot sauce.  Also made some green chili pickled which is so hot.  Can you tell I'm addicted?  All this from our greenhouse.  We planted lettuce and spinach and kale in there in October and we'll see how it does over the winter.  We have a small problem with an area that gets flooded and this will need to be addressed next year.  

Right now I'm writing from the city.  We just bought a motorcycle and we have to stick it on the back of our trailer and take it home.  Long drive.  I'm very worried about it falling over.  Probably it will be alright.  We'll let you know.  A motorcycle seemed like a great idea but now I realize that it's just added a lot of complexity to our lives.  I have to now learn to be an amateur motorcycle mechanic.  I guess it's learning something new.  But I would much rather not.  I think I'm just seeing it as daunting but changing oil and lubing chains isn't actually that much of a big deal.  Will be so sweet to go for a ride next year!

And in case you think I'm going through a mid-life crisis, we actually got this to be a commuter bike.  We were hoping to get rid of one car and have a car and motorbike.  It may happen.  But with non-driving family about we can't seem to shake that we are effectively a taxi service. 

Rambling on.  Stay tuned.  Or not.

City Blues

So I'm here in the city.  Blah, blah, blah.  The good news is that I'm going home tomorrow.  All we seem to do here is go shopping and eat out.  I guess these are the things that one does in the city.  I suppose that if I ended up staying here I would find a way to pass the days but it does seem to all involve spending money.  Maybe I would have a few projects. 

But I suppose I should mention that it's not all bad.  We get things here that we just can't back home.  We appreciate that.  We even went to see a movie which was something we hadn't done in what feels like years.  Together at least.  It was Looper, a pretty cool movie.  Though there was this outrageous preview for a new movie called Red Dawn.  Apparently North Korea, invades the US and the patriotic hicks fight back.  It's more of the bizarro world, I laughed as loud as I could.  I guess when you are the country that actually invades others, regularly, you have to pretend that you are always under attack. 

I guess the thing for me is that I feel useless in the city.  I'm really just killing time, and that seems a crappy way to live for me.  At least I'm writing this blog post. 

And there's cable here and I'm watching game four of the World Series.  So much advertising.  The opening pitch was brought to us by Budweiser.  The defensive lineup brought to you by Dick's.  Just killing time again.

Thought Prisons

We're about to have a municipal election where I live.  Six council positions and three have been acclaimed.  The others are likely to go straight to the incumbents.  But you never know.  But even if a new candidate was elected, he or she is likely to inhabit the same thought prison as his or her predecessor. 

This idea of thought prisons just popped into my head.  In politics, but thought and debate about major issues more generally, we are really only allowed to operate within a tight band of opinion.  So for instance the (global) economy is viewed by all within our thought prison as a wonderful, unquestioned thing that brings us stability, happiness and fulfillment.  No one brings up the negatives including its direct link to the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.  It's not even that we are prevented from bringing it up, we actually restrain ourselves. Try standing in a meeting and describing how the economy acts like a cancer, growing endlessly and consuming life.  You'd think you had turned into a card carrying Liberal, talking about how we need sustainable growth or a 'green' economy as if some food colouring would help.  Well maybe that's just me.  It's even worse if there's a camera around. 

When I think of Canadian politics much like US politics, many progressive people long for the rise of the NDP to be the government of Canada.  The party has some impressive policies in some areas.  But having seen this rise on a provincial level (figured out where I live yet) we should expect to be disappointed.  To be electable in Canada you have to embrace your thought prison.  You can have some wiggle room to be pro-choice or pro-life but as long as you don't challenge the thought prison (and you can't) then you can rise to the occasion.  I can see a federal NDP government calling for a 'balanced' approach to fracking or how they support 'responsible' mining in developing countries.  But, hey, we'll feel happy in our thought prison at least and maybe that's all that matters.

The US election is particularly disturbing on this charge.  Check out the great analysis from Glenn Greenwald below if you have a few minutes.  Last night I was lying awake with visions of Obama-plums dancing in my head.  I thought of the evil one party Soviet Union but really what you have in the US is the same thing but you can change the colour if you like.  The result, and the thought prison, is the same.  Feeling a bit misogynist, vote Republican!  Feeling guilty that you're gorging while some family starves in a tent on the other side of town, vote Democrat!  But in the end there's really only one party in the thought prison.

I was thinking about how this might change, how these thought prisons might be smashed open (metaphorically of course).  Is it even possible to change after so many years of what could easily be called brainwashing?  Really deprivation and suffering are how things will change.  If you're not completely worn out and run ragged and can see that you have less while others have more then you might notice the prison and think outside this thin band of thought.  It's a tall order.  But I suppose there also have to be thinkers and demagogues to articulate new thoughts.  

Now I'll go back to reading articles and opinions that further restrict me to my thought prison.  And on Saturday we'll welcome a new county council with a lot of new ideas.  They'll just look a lot like the old ones.  What a relief!

Everybody Knows

No recovery until 2018.  Came across that one today.  I'd love to travel forward until 2018 and see the similar comments from learned economists then.  'No recovery until 2025'.  It's looking to me like there is never going to be a recovery (whatever that means) and that makes sense from all I've been reading these recent years.  I guess this is the Long Emergency.  The funny thing is that the 'collapse' is very fragmented.  Many people are still going to do well, especially the rich, but slowly more and more families are going to move into challenging times. And greenhouse gas emissions are still going to rise.  I guess that no matter what, learning about food is still a good idea.  And having no debt. 

Last weekend I dropped my dad off at the bus and walked over to a yard sale at a recently shut down gas station (how's that for an image?).  Most of the stuff on display was pretty poor quality.  I found some solidly built baskets from a lady from down the road.  We had a nice chat.  Invariably she wanted to know 'where I was really from'.  Whatever, it only partly bothers me these days.  But most interestingly when I told her I moved here to learn about real things instead of sitting in front of a computer for the rest of my life (yes I recognize the irony right now).  She said pretty boldly that she thinks we're headed for a collapse and that we're going to need to remember how to do things the way they were always done.  But she lamented how much kids just know about cell phones and computers and don't even care to learn these essentials.  

Most times when I talk with people I bump into we never get much beyond the weather or some such surface detail.  But if we dig in, like I did with this lady, I think we all know that the party's over.  I should have pressed her to talk more.  Even the IMF's economists know it.  But it's hard to talk about it publicly.  It seems like a downer.  But it's real and I honestly don't see it as a downer.  But I'm crazy of course.